The Palestinian Authority’s health ministry announced last Thursday night the death of two Palestinians from Israeli gunfire in Jenin, in the northern part of the occupied West Bank, where bloody incidents are a daily occurrence.

The ministry said in a statement that two men “whose identity is not yet known” were killed “by occupation bullets in the Jenin (refugee) camp”. Another man was killed in the same town the day before Wednesday.

For its part, the Israeli army said yesterday that a soldier, Sergeant Liam Hazi, 20, a member of a reconnaissance battalion, “fell during an operation” and a fellow soldier was seriously wounded.

The Times of Israel reported that the NCO was killed during an exchange of fire with Palestinian militants in Jenin.

Meanwhile, Palestinian media reported that a 42-year-old man was killed yesterday by Israeli fire in Nablus, also in the northern Palestinian territory, and his wife was wounded.

The Israeli army is conducting a large-scale operation in the Jenin area and the adjacent refugee camp, now in its tenth day.

At the heart of the operation was the refugee camp during the early days of the “Iron Wall”, as the operation was dubbed, the refugee camp; the target was Palestinian militants affiliated with the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad movements.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Kats has indicated that the army will remain in the city even after the operation is completed to “guarantee that terrorism will not return”, prompting strong reactions.

The Israeli armed forces also confirmed that they killed “ten terrorists” in an airstrike the day before yesterday (Wednesday) in the village of Tamoun, in Tubas province, southeast of Jenin.

“During a joint operation between the army and the Shin Bet (internal security and intelligence service), air force drones attacked a group of armed terrorists in the Tamoun area,” according to the text, which claims that two of the dead were involved in an explosives attack on January 20 that resulted in the death of an Israeli soldier.

Palestinian sources had already announced the bombing and the death toll of ten the day before. Hamas denounced “the escalation of the crimes of the fascist occupation in the West Bank and the ongoing policy of killing heroic members of the resistance and mujahideen (i.e. ‘holy warriors’).”

Violence escalated rapidly in the West Bank, an area under Israeli occupation since 1967, after war broke out between Hamas and the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip on 7 October 2023.

At least 876 Palestinians have died there in Israeli army operations or settler attacks since then, according to Palestinian Authority health ministry figures.

On the other side, at least 30 Israelis have died, either in Palestinian attacks or hostilities during operations in the same period, according to official Israeli figures.